Globalization, empire and imperialism are emerging as competing yet interlaced terms for the formation and geography of the world as well as markers which anti-globalization and global justice movements define themselves through and in opposition to. In some usages, globalization and empire nestle relatively easily within each other as a capitalist order which, while not fully smoothing out the surface of the globe, is spread as a supranational process over the entirety of the globe. This view, despite acknowledging the global uneven development of capitalism, tends to present a world where global flows breach the borders of the nation state and erode the edges of interstate rivalries. Imperialism enters into this fluid world conception as an irritant - as a grit from the past which scratches the conceptual surface of an empire without borders and without a center.

Empire, as it is defined by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's influential book of the same name, relegates imperialism to the past - as a stage that has been passed through in the march of history: »From imperialism to Empire and from nation-state to the political regulation of the global market: what we are witnessing from the point of view of historical materialism, is a qualitative passage in modern history« (237). In another view from historical materialism, Timothy Brennan points to an »infrastructural necessity of imperialism« in contrast to Hardt and Negri's focus on a »dreamlike desire of fluid social boundaries [that] effectively blurs the crude imperialism of American realpolitik« (367). The perceived crudeness of theories of imperialism - either as a stage capitalism has passed through or as a too-blunt analysis of state power - has lead to its ambiguous relationship to globalization. But, as globalization hardens beyond liberal developmentalism and cosmopolitanism, there is no consensus on whether globalization supplanted forms of imperialism, or whether globalization is just another form of imperialism. Yet both imperialism and empire have reemerged, unapologetically and with a casual assumption that it is both the U.S.'s burden and right, in the dominant media in North America.

The public-opinion shapers of the blunt American imperialism ironically use empire in a much more material manner than Hardt and Negri, deploying it in terms of a civilizing force happily brought to the world by American exceptionalism. In their view it is both an extension of a liberal developmentalism imagined as non-ideological and anti-authoritarian (»democratic«) and as the highest cultural and economic stage of capitalism. And as such, something to be celebrated internally and accepted externally.

Much of the rhetoric of imperialism coming out of the U.S. has taken a culturalist shape, preaching (literally) consumption, democracy (synonyms now), and »freedom from tyranny« as reasons for renewed imperialist expansions. While both Lenin and Hardt and Negri propose imperialism as a stage of capitalism, it can be seen in a different spatio-temporality as one form of capitalist accumulation running amok alongside others. This form of imperialism that relies on the world accepting American forms of democracy, law, and governance by direction or domination also has a cultural aspect to it which is both ideological and economic (the iron fist in the velvet glove!). But theories of cultural globalization, and of culture in globalization, do not provide a sharp lens through which to examine how cultural imperialism exists is intertwined with the new neoliberal imperialism. How can the language of globalization include these new forms of imperialism?

[b]New Imperialism and »Other Means«[/b]

Peter Gowan suggests that we do not have available to us a »language for describing this pattern global social power«. The Pax Americana or the Washington Consensus that coheres global social power in Gowan's proposal is not centerless but is created by »the enlargement of U.S. social control within the framework of an international order of juristically sovereign states« (89).This view counters others that, within a framework of European colonialisms, saw »both state sovereignty and international markets as the opposites of imperialism« (89). A distinct feature of new forms of imperialism is the interlacing of state sovereignty and international markets in the neoliberal project. Theorists of this new form of imperialism, such as Leo Panitch, have argued that the nation-state remains intact and crucial to globalization, and that »…the process of globalization, far from dwarfing states, has been constituted through and even by them« (15). This counters globalization theory - both cultural and economic - that predict the withering away of the nation-state or its supplantation by a network of transnational corporations that function separately from states.

There has been a movement from, as William Tabb writes, the fact that »The state ›container‹ remains but its function becomes increasingly a disciplinary one as the policies of governments are reoriented to serve globalization functions on behalf of transnational capital« to a view (as Panitch proposes) that states serve the processes of globalization which are increasingly controlled by U.S. hegemony which »Americanizes« state structures as the states themselves are penetrated by neoliberal ideals which they inflict on their populations in the name of a better future for all - despite a miserable present for more and more. The discipline inflicted by states on their populations is sometimes done to follow World Bank policies of austerity or in the neoliberal pursuit of opened markets in conjunction with weakened social contracts. In this new imperialism, nations can even disagree politically with the U.S. as they impose neoliberal policies in their countries. In a familiar narrative, German Chancellor Schroeder has said »all Germans must accept painful reforms that would help pull their country out of its economic rut«. To the agreement of national and foreign banks and the EU, he will make »benefit cuts and introduce more flexible market rules«.

Within this international political economy we are better able to locate forms of imperialism with a broader definition of imperialism itself. Here is a working definition from William Tabb: »Imperialism is not simply about territorial acquisition, but more broadly involves gaining political and economic controls over other peoples and lands, whether by military or more subtle means. It is a matter of state policy and practice extending power and domination, often by economic means« (80). Their dominant media in the U.S. takes pains to avoid seeing its form of imperialism as having territorial ambitions. Thomas Freidman of The New York Times supplies an anecdote about a non-territorial imagining of imperialism: »When one of the Egyptian journalists at Feshawi's [teahouse] insisted that we [the U.S.] were out to ›occupy‹ Iraq, I quoted to him a line from Colin Powell: America is as powerful as any empire in history, but when it has invaded other countries the only piece of land it has ever asked for was a tiny plot to bury its soldiers who would not be returning home«. Aside from its historical inaccuracies and the recent massive expansion of U.S. military bases, this can be seen as America's narrative of its benevolent »uplifting« form of development not being a territorial form of imperialism - a narrative that imagines itself being against European forms of colonization.

[b]Neoliberal Cultural Imperialism[/b]

The new neoliberal imperialism and new instances of cultural imperialism are an uneasy fit with theories of cultural globalization. There are several reasons why the language of cultural globalization misaligns with the new neoliberal regime. One arises out of a reluctance to address imperialism, as if it is a stage arrested in the past which would have been rendered less effective by the connectivity of global cultural flows and interconnections. The second tendency is embedded into the smooth spatiality of the geography of empire, a geography that carries a weakness in conceptualizing the nation and state functions.

Cultural theories have sought to overcome global-national issues by jumping over the national scale, polysemous identity constructs and strong local culture theories. This movement to global flows diverts a renewed consideration of cultural imperialism as flows and semi-autonomous scapes are understood as the negation of cultural imperialism because they spring situated cultures free of colonial models of center and periphery and free up identities, ideas, and images for insurgent tactics beyond colonial reproduction. But global flows do not counter capitalist reproduction. In fact, the language of global flows mimics a stage of national-based capitalist expansionism earlier in the 20th century. Emily Rosenberg documents the »spreading of the American dream« by the ideology of liberal developmentalism - an ideology that denied its own imperialist effects through the language of development and uplift. Developmentalist views are unfortunately recognizable in both the imperialist rhetoric of today and in cultural globalization theory: »Liberal-developmentalist thus saw America's free-flow doctrines as helping to spread truth and knowledge in an essentially democratic marketplace. Free flow, they argued, was nonideological and anti-authoritarian« (11). This turn-of-the-century strategy is inaugurated, like empire, by shifts in the world system and by changes in the modes of production.

Development is today deeply embedded into neoliberal projects of globalization - in virulent and punitive versions from the IMF and World Bank, but also in the United Nations Development Plan (UNDP) that dons the mask of humanism and uplift to obscure its on-the-ground effects. The model of global flows and of the scapes of global space begins to resemble neoliberal descriptions of the movement of goods and capital that development programs promise. These theories disturbingly run alongside the geography of a »free-market utopianism« -a process pushed globally by the U.S. after World War II.

Like liberal developmentalism, cultural imperialism appears to have been defined earlier as having both an imperial effect and a cultural effect. The imperial effect is essentially economic and expansive, that one culture dominates by virtue of its greater production and distribution and thus benefits economically at the expense of other national cultures. The cultural effect is the domination and transformation of one culture by another. Couched in terms of uplift or in terms of »democracy«, this cultural imperialism is pushed as a tool of modernization. As with the imperialism of finance, cultural imperialism is both an extension of a foreign policy and of the domestic market, as Rosenberg notes: »America's cultural offensive, no less than its postwar economic program, represented a government-directed effort to integrate others into a new Pax Americana« (228). A hemispheric to global hegemony radiated out from American modes of production and distribution to treaties, coercion, corruption and fraud. Today, it radiates out with the assistance of other states who have joined in the neoliberal project and by its own overwhelming military might (which has come at the cost of militarizing U.S. culture and economy).

In contrast to the strident manner in which neoliberal cultural imperialism is imagined, John Tomlinson is wary giving cultural imperialism an »artificial coherence«; instead he proposes that »A better way of thinking about cultural imperialism is to think of it as a variety of differential articulations which may have certain features in common, but may also be in tension with each other, even mutually contradictory« (9). This differential view is also based in a wariness of capitalism as a homogenizing cultural force that circulates in cultural globalization theory, a theory that understands the local to naturally defend against homogenizing global forces. But as Panitch argues in terms of the imperial neoliberal regime, a hierarchically organized international political economy which has internal tensions, unevenness and contradictions has an effective cohesion. A contingent coherence is necessary for any theory of hegemony - but also a theory of fixity (of capital and of social forces) must be asserted in globalization theory. Coherence can be found only too easily in the economic, cultural and social effects of the new imperialism. And, as neoliberal policies in various countries have shown, captialism acts as a homogenizing social force despite the variations of everyday cultural practices within it. The economic models of austerity or production imposed on developing countries by WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF force a cultural model that is deeply interlaced into a neoliberal economic and social model.

New forms of cultural imperialism have to be understood as interlaced into the economic mission of neoliberalism and its social program. Just as the economic and the cultural can not be disarticulated, neither can the social be the missing term. The project of neoliberalism has profound social effects - the opening of state markets, the Americanizing of accounting and bankruptcy laws, the pressures on border policing now, the push to erode other aspects associated with the Keynesian state such as national health care, unionization, pension funds, and the instability to labour caused by capital's mobility and its search for greater surplus value, as well as what Randy Martin calls the »financialization of daily life« etc. - all of these shape not only cultural aspects of life (»cultural« understood in a broad sense of »way of life«) but also transform the structure of society that is so deeply constitutive of all things cultural.

Forms of cultural imperialism in the new imperialism take place at and are embedded into a number of geographic scales. I want to suggest that cultural imperialism happens as part of an economic expansion - part of capital's urge to expand across the globe in order to avoid crises - but that it also forms at a level within the state and that it also has an ideological-cultural function that is not strictly economic but more properly social - aimed at restructuring the social in the same way neoliberal trade policies have also restructured the social. Cultural imperialism then is both external and internal, expansive and restrictive, subnational and supranation.

Cultural expansion - via treaties and, in the case of Iraq, by military force - go hand in hand with restrictions and clampdowns on culture internally. The sacking of the National Museum in Baghdad on April 10, made possible as the »coalition of the willing« forces guarded the ministry of oil and oil rigs but left key cultural sites unguarded (despite warnings from advisers and despite the museum looting in 1991 Gulf War) is an example of what David Harvey is calling »accumulation by dispossession - an accumulation strategy within the new imperialism«. ¹ The imperialist expansion into Iraq has dispossessed the country of its cultural institutions and manifestations of its cultural history. Into this void, American cultural products are poised to step. In the New York Times, Frank Rich chronicles three events on April 10 - the day of the looting - that set up this cultural imperialism. First, George W. Bush appeared on Iraqi television and said, via subtitles, that the Iraqi people are »the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity«. Secondly, it was announced that U.S. newscasts would appear nightly on Iraqi television. And last, the Bush Administration sought $62 million from the U.S. congress to establish a 24-hour Middle East Television network that would »pipe in dubbed over versions of [American] prime-time network programming« (Rich 1).The interplay of the economic and the military, of the economic and the cultural, and of the universal and the particular are striking here. Having dispossessed the Iraqis of their »great civilization«, the »contribution to all humanity« will now be made by U.S. culture - a culture with the necessary military backing to make it universal.

Accumulation by dispossession is brutal, but also cultural and ideological. It illustrates the uses of culture in the new imperialism - that is, culture is not pacified or merely rendered a commodity, but is embedded in a process of commodification and recommodification within capitalist accumulation. In the international art market this can be seen in how different types of art practices struggle to dominance nationally - and globally - in a positions war within the market. But also various cultural identities become recommodified - if they are presented in a consumable enough manner. This is not a stage of capitalism - as Lenin proposed imperialism was - but part of a continual process of accumulation. The »culture-ideology of consumption« has deepened and resisted alternative proposals where they exist - this can also be seen as a part of cultural imperialism that is both global and at other scales - the urban, the national, the regional. Its effects are registered there socially - despite its global push.

If cultural imperialism functions in a similar way to the new imperialism - through interpenetration and transformation to brute accumulation by dispossession - a counter-hegemonic cultural role for the state and for cultural production has to be formulated within the framework of the new imperialism. This formulation has to cover a range of geographic scales and go beyond national cultures as either a formation within the nation-container and beyond the domination of one national culture by another, or the domination of a subnational culture by a national culture. Counter-hegemonic strategies must cross scales, but without imagining the scales themselves to be dissolved. And coherence and contingency must be understood as existing simultaneously. For example, U.S. cultural dominance is necessarily contingent and is beginning to show cracks as the internal and external pressures of US imperialism clash. The neoliberal project, pushed as a universal project for all nations (whether developed or under-developed) loses its ideological smokescreen as it intersects with U.S. unilateralism in its foreign policy. The U.S. cultural ideals promoted along with the neoliberal project lose their appearance of universal values when this unilateralism highlights the extent of U.S. interests in neoliberal globalization.²

Into the cracks in this contingent universalizing of U.S. culture and cultural ideals, cultural production steps in. But the recognition of particular cultures and identities are not all that is at stake now. Instead there must be a devastating critique internally and the imagining of cultural values other than consumption externally.

Thanks to William Tabb and Christian Parenti for suggestions on this essay.

 

 

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